Saturday, November 12, 2005

NaNoWriMo Day 12

Word count from Thursday: Class, but I wrote some I'm not ready to count yet. I will when I use them for a Rayelle scene, which is when I intend to put them into the total.

Word count from Friday: 2,105.

Word count from today: 2,109.

Let's go to the NaNoWriMo Big Jerry Lewis Marathon-style Boards and see what we got.

*drum roll*

Word total: 20,799!

*confetti comes from the ceiling, followed by an avalanche of balloons with "20,000" printed on them.

20,000! Woot! 20,000. Overwrought Krusty-the-Clown hysterics as I weep before the audience.

Now, if I can only get to the closing sequence where Patrick foils his antagonist by, say, Tuesday, everything will be most excellent.

Song of the evening: "True Love Waits (live)," by Radiohead.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Class tonight

So a NaNoWriMo update either late tonight (not likely) or a double helping on Friday night. Will be hard to write Friday night, knowing I have a Netflix copy of "MST3K: Hercules vs The Moon Men" and "Aeon Flux" on the coffee table.

There's only so much a man can withstand before succumbing to temptation.

Song of the evening: "3 a.m." by Dub Pistols.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

NaNoWriMo: Day 9

Word total: 16,765
Word count for today: 2,105.

Lacing together a few scenes, filling in the gaps where I leap off one scene and create another to start writing something fresh. After about an hour into a scene, I get a little petulant, which makes my mind wander when I write, so I jump into something new which doubles how fast I write.

Class tomorrow. Bringing my laptop. I type twice as fast with a laptop, and just a little faster with Radiohead in my head. I worry about introducing caffeine into the equation because I just might move so fast I break the sound barrier. Or my fingers. Sound barrier, cool. Fingers, not so cool.

A belated song of the evening: "Sacrifice," by Lisa Gerrard.
Between the know and don't know

A rare mid-afternoon post.

In a turbulence where the novel feels as if it's falling apart, yet tightening up. I can see the answer just out of reach, and I'm writing as fast as I can toward it. I'm about...there...where things will feel a lot cleaner and connect faster. It's almost as if I know what I'm writing before I do it, but I don't know what it is until I do it. Perhaps the unconscious is coming out to play. Out of the blue yesterday, I mumbled something about the relation between two characters that I never thought before, but I'm mulling it over, seeing how the Moebius strip of the novel's characters are becoming intertwined in an cascade of fate-twisting.

Good news at the office. My boss asked me if I wanted to do a mini-review of the forthcoming Complete Aeon Flux Animated Collection on DVD, which took me about .00006 seconds to decide that, hell yes I'll do it. Haven't seen Peter Chung's experiment in cartoony cyberkinetic martial arts dystopian jazz in a long time, and am looking forward to seeing my favorite amoral, nearly-nude assassin who died in nearly episode. She was a proto-Kenny McCormick, who died one week only to reappear the next. Badder than Buffy, nuder than Wonder Woman, Aeon was the dark side of the who Girls Rock phenom in the 90s, back when MTV (which aired the episodes at the time) could be applauded for taking risks as they found themselves growing bored with the media they helped create: music videos.

Just a side note related to the novel, the series "villain" (depending on how you watched the series) Trevor Goodchild was a partial inspiration for Rayelle's antagonist, except this Trevor is a more feral version, Frank Luntz with the 28 Days Later virus. Aeon's Trevor was a futuristic Bond baddie, or (eerily) a young Montgomery Burns with his own Aldous Huxley totalitarian play set. Elegant, cold as chrome, genius with an ego problem. The only match for the nimble and cruel Aeon.

The DVDs are, no surprise, out to cash in on the upcoming live-action Aeon Flux flick opening Dec. 2 in America, which looks flat-out laughable, especially when you see award-winning Charlize Theron in her quasi-Trinity body sock. Aeon belongs in her over-the-top upside fang hairstyle and leather g-string combat holster. The only women who could be Aeon are in Cirque du Soleil, which is ideal. Aeon rarely spoke, except to inflict "The Prisoner"-style mindfucks on her prey. Aeon was a lethal ballet artiste, and that's all you need. But yet, instead of dropping $55 million on a live-action version, give $10 million to Chung to make an animated version faithful to its core. At a lower price, the studio will make up the money in first-run and DVD sales. Oh well, no one listens to me.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

NaNoWriMo Day 8

Word count for the day: 2,238.
Word total: 14,660

Not too thrilled about tonight. Patrick is running the risk of having two Sermon on the Mount moments, when he should have one. His antagonist has a long-winded speech about his plan. He's monologuing a bit, and when I looked up to see what I wrote, I expected him to have a monocle and a Persian kitty.

Screw it. Off to watch "House."

Song of the evening: "Dollars and Cents," by Radiohead.

Monday, November 07, 2005

NaNoWriMo Day Seven

Word count: 12,422 (2,301 today in about two hours). Wrote a lot of Patrick and his antagonist. Working to a great sequence of events that will close out his story. If I can knock it out before the week ends, I can move on to Rayelle. She has about 7-8 scenes I need to draft up to consider her story finished. It's a strange crossroads I'm at. I can see the novel coming together, but then I see more holes. I see it when I write as part of NaNoWriMo. It's all spiraling out of control and coming together at once. Oh, I wonder how long it'll take me to rewrite this disfigured mutant.

Caught "Boondocks" over the weekend on Adult Swim. The art style is like ghetto anime, which has it's own disorienting slickness, like a cultural blender on frappe. The voices for Huey and Riley are all wrong. Have no idea how the series will turn out this early into the run, but I have an inkling it'll be like how the Dilbert series went: Faithful at its core, a cult hit at best.

Song of the evening: "King of the Mountain," by Kate Bush.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

NaNoWriMo Day 6

Word total: 10,121.

*blows in a little kazoo to find pitch*

Happy 10,000 to me.
Happy 10,000 to me.
Happy 10,000 to meeeeeee.
Happy 10,000 to me!

Patrick scene again, where our hero/hostage gets some things revealed to him after being lightly electrocuted. It's a bit too slow, but it's a first draft. I need to pick up the pace. I want to knock out a couple more scenes with Patrick before I move back to Rayelle. Tomorrow would be a good time to check in on the scenes I need to write before NaNoWriMo ends.

Also, I'm getting more than 2,000 words a day. I feel like I'm cheating myself somehow (of course it can't be guilt from my wife catching me on the Internet when I'm supposed to be writing. Nosiree, bob). I should write more. If I can push to a scene every couple days, or at least 2,500 words so I can cover more ground. At least I won't be behind when I have class on Thursday and I more or less stop writing.

Song of the evening: "Svefn-g-englar" by Sigur Ros. Can't pronounce it, but I love the universal ethereal dreaminess of it. Reminds me of when my uncle would take me flying in his small plane the color of a bumblebee. We would lift off from the runway during a moody Chicago spring and go into a thick belt of clouds. No visibility as the windows are wrapped in an ivory blanket for miles around. You are adrift, unaware of what's out there, yet you are ensconced in tranquility as your hands command the machine through bloated whiteness. You have snuck into heaven, just for a while.